This Week In Facebook - February 14, 2009

The past week was a busy one for Facebook, however Google clearly stole the show last week with the launch of their new Buzz product. While analysts and bloggers continue to analyze the impact of the new product, it's clear that the search behemoth is not giving up control of the social web easily. Read about Google's new attack against Facebook and some of the latest product releases from Facebook over the past week in this week's roundup. Electronic Arts To Release Madden NFL On Facebook Electronic Arts has made it clear that they are taking social games seriously. Following the acquisition of Playfish, Electronic Arts announced that they would soon bring Madden NFL to Facebook. How the game will be integrated is unknown at this point, however it's clear that Electronic Arts wants to be one of the major players in the rapidly emerging social games space. Facebook Adds Dashboard Stories Opt-Out Feature Hoping to squash some of the ongoing debate over the dashboard privacy flaw, Facebook announced that they would let users opt-out of application stories via a new privacy setting. Whether or not this is sufficient has yet to be decided, however it's clear that Facebook's looking to resolve the issue. While we're still convinced that the new setting was not implemented transparently, no significant privacy watch dogs have mentioned anything about the lack of transparency in the new move. Facebook Kills Lexicon While we previously mentioned that Facebook Lexicon was no longer working, the company officially killed Lexicon last week. While a relatively small percentage of users gained value from the service, it provided a decent amount of insight into macro trends within Facebook at any given point. Facebook also published their own findings from the product in occasional blog posts. For the time being, Facebook appears to be more focused on new products and improving existing ones rather than providing data insight. Google Goes After Facebook With Buzz The biggest story of the week was the launch of Google Buzz which is Google's biggest splash in the social media space to date. Integrated into Gmail, Buzz instantly has a network of over 100 million users, and it appears to provide a great amount of functionality. With integration into Google's other full-featured products (Docs, Calendar, Gmail, Contacts, etc), it has some benefits over Facebook and media-darling Twitter. Whether or not Buzz will have mainstream consumer appeal is not yet known, however the tech pundits can't get enough of the new product. AOL Integrates Facebook Chat Into AIM & Facebook Announces Opening Of Chat Facebook Chat had a huge week with the opening of the platform to developers and the launch of Facebook chat's integration into AIM. The only thing that users are waiting on at this point is the launch of the Facebook video chat which we saw hints of last May. Unfortunately there has been little else mentioned about the service. We hope to see Facebook roll out video chat later this year. Facebook Surpasses 100 Million Mobile Users Facebook announced that the company officially surpassed 100 million mobile users, accounting for a quarter of the total active user base. The company has almost doubled its mobile user base in six months while only growing the total user base over 30 percent in the same amount of time. We only expect to see the trend toward mobile continue over the next few years.

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This Week In Facebook - February 14, 2009

Nick O'Neill

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